Trouble in Eden

“Antichrist.”

It would be a shock if “Antichrist” had turned out to be anything but shocking. After all, the giving of offense has long been the stock-in-trade of its writer and director, Lars von Trier, the man who brought us “Breaking the Waves,” “The Idiots,” and “Dogville.” This year, the new film was jeered to the rafters at the Cannes Film Festival, although the energetic snagging of attention is as hallowed a Cannes custom as the hiking of prices in the local seafood joints. Better by far to see the movie now, and thus to establish, under less seething conditions, if the provocation was indeed a mere flourish of perverse P.R., or whether it remains an essential part of some more solemn design.

We begin at the deep end, with copulation and death. An unnamed man, listed in the credits only as He (Willem Dafoe), and his wife, otherwise known as She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), are in the bathroom of their family home, busy doing It. This is a rapturous occasion, shot in glittering monochrome, featuring slow-motion closeups of the conjugal act, and stirred by the dolorous strains of a Handel aria. “May sorrow break these chains of my sufferings, for pity’s sake,” the libretto tells us: a curious invocation—we expect joy, not sorrow, to perform that task—and one that von Trier is only too eager to obey, closing the sequence with the orgasm of the adults and, simultaneously, the fatal fall of their young son, who climbs to a window and drops into the snow-thickened night. Because their attention was distracted by desire, their grief will be compounded and crazed by guilt.

At this point, we shift into color, although anyone expecting the director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle, to revisit the hot hues of his previous film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” will be disappointed. “Antichrist” is set in Seattle and the wilds of the Northwest, as far from Mumbai as can be imagined, and the glum interiors—the bathroom where the couple made love is now a scummy blue—compete for desolation with the great outdoors. Our first hint that the natural world will be a wellspring not of pastoral ease but of mystification and threat comes at the heroine’s bedside, in a clinic; she lies there, leaden with loss, while the camera closes in on the stalks of a well-wisher’s flowers in a vase next to her—rotting stumps of green, in a swirling murk. Her husband, a psychologist, takes her home and tells her not to dodge her distress but to meet it face to face. “Will it get worse?” she asks. “Yes, it will,” he replies. He asks her to nominate the place where she is most afraid. “The woods,” she says, and so into the woods, for the rest of the film, they go.

“Antichrist,” whose title I don’t claim to understand, is split into chapters, with headings like “Despair (Gynocides)” and “Pain (Chaos Reigns).” It would be hard to prove that these mean much, or refer to any cogent structure in the film. At best, they are a mocking mirror of the steps undertaken in therapy, and one thing that rises from “Antichrist” is a disdain for the limitations of the shrink. There are more things in heaven and earth, the film suggests, than are dream’d of in our psychology, and there is true venom in the wife’s voice when she says to her spouse, “I never interested you till now. Now I’m your patient.” What is more, the savagery that has earned the film its noisome reputation begins only after she has announced, “I’m cured, I’m fine.” Civilizing science, in other words, has done its duty and withdrawn, allowing the bestial—that part of humanity which lies beyond the reach of reason—to emerge and flex its jaws.

By this time, He and She are in Eden, their secluded shack in the countryside. Call me fanciful, but I think the name is on the loaded side, for it is here that the fall of man and the collapse of woman take place, and where the landscape, its trees as lopped and blasted as those on a battlefield, looks anything but prelapsarian. A fox lies bleeding in the long grass, which rustles like the suburban lawn at the start of “Blue Velvet”; a startled doe runs off with a half-born fawn still swinging from her rump; a chick, splayed on the ground but not yet dead, swarms with marauding ants. The humans, too, are under siege: first from acorns that rifle onto the roof like bullets and from weird spores—is that what they are?—that smother the man’s hand when he wakes in the morning, and, second, from each other. For every promise of affection, there is a snap of wrath, and the woman who declares, “I love you, darling,” is the same person who, not long after, fetches a drill to bore a hole in her beloved’s leg, plus a pair of scissors for herself. If you have eyes, prepare to shut them now.

A word to the squeamish: there is no shame in leaving as the tools—and I use the word advisedly—come out. In a way, you will be getting the best of “Antichrist,” which until now has been a film of awkwardness, confusion, and great beauty. I see no reason to ally oneself wholeheartedly either with those who despise von Trier for his horrific silliness or with those who revere his ambition. Both have a point, and the problem is that von Trier, even at his most objectionable, can summon a wealth of images that defy explanation. I am thinking of the forest, at night, and the couple, unclothed and entangled, amidst the gnarled roots of a tree, with white hands sprouting from the earth as if to drag them down; or of the woman alone there, pleasuring herself in a kind of fury, with the man—and his paltry pleasures—no longer required.

At Cannes, the film received two prizes: one for Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Best Actress, and a scornful anti-trophy for von Trier, awarded for misogyny by the Ecumenical Jury. How the two should be squared I am unsure. The movie certainly shudders with a terror of female power, and the last thing we see is a monstrous regiment of women, their faces blanked out, streaming up a hillside, like the nightmare of a Puritan preacher. Yet so plain is Gainsbourg’s dramatic dominance, as opposed to her place in von Trier’s mad ideological scheme, that she carries the tale with a conviction barely hinted at in the script. Dafoe is game but wearily baffled, as if he were only just realizing what he signed up for, and how it adds to his list of screen punishments: first he had hot wax dripped onto his sternum by Madonna, in “Body of Evidence,” then he suffered the intense humiliation of being beaten up by Tobey Maguire, in “Spider-Man,” and now he has a log being used as a battering ram on his private parts. Even Madonna would have frowned at that.

The worst aspect of the violence here is not so much its methodical nastiness, or even its taint of exhibitionism (“Gaze upon this, if you dare,” von Trier seems to say), as the way in which it debases the milder but more serious acts of aggression in the earlier scenes. The couple’s lovemaking, after the child’s demise, has an edge of extremity that is both upsetting—the woman bites the man, and later asks him to hit her—and dangerously credible. To my eyes, this is the one area in which “Antichrist,” so often ridiculous, makes sense: as a study of the kinship between loss and lust. Few subjects are trickier to approach. A. D. Nuttall, in “Shakespeare the Thinker,” published posthumously in 2007, argues that when the newly widowed Lady Anne, in “Richard III,” yields to the advances of the disfigured hero she is “compliant not so much in spite of her bereavement as because of it.” Then, there is Gerald, in D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” stealing into Gudrun’s bedroom three days after his father’s funeral: “into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again.” Some hope. Cinema has given us the married couple, stricken by their daughter’s drowning, in “Don’t Look Now,” who can still take an audience aback with the urgency of their grappling (might they be trying for another child?), and Nanni Moretti, in this year’s “Quiet Chaos,” who is numbed by the passing of his wife at the start of the film, but who jolts himself awake toward the end, with a strenuous bout. In each case, the equation is simple: the pulse of life, felt most strongly in sex, is greater than the terrifying zero of death.

The same applies to “Antichrist,” with a twist: it was sex that led to death in the first place. That’s why the movie is so self-involved, and leaves you fighting for breath, and why I believe von Trier when he describes the whole thing as a “dream film.” That would account for the want of logic, for the claustrophobia, and for the incantatory manner in which details loop round and recur. I can no more rid myself of the memory of the wife, in a glowing white dress, crossing a moonlit bridge, than I can of Arthur Rackham drawings in a book of fairy tales from my childhood. I feel the same way about the fox in the film; without warning, it speaks, and most people giggle at the sound, but we accept something similar in “Peter and the Wolf,” so why the derision here, since von Trier is clearly carving out a fable? Maybe that should be his next challenge: a PG rating. Skip the mutilation, stay in the woods, and make as strange a film as possible for kids. We can take it. ♦